Executive Summary

In Kochi, we surveyed 2,023 households across 64 polling parts, including 10 booster polling parts, conducted focus groups and interviewed a wide range of key respondents. 

Kochi is a very prosperous city compared to the six other cities in our sample (Vadodara, Bhavnagar, Ahmedabad, Chennai, Hyderabad and Mumbai). Fully 33% of the households live in upper class housing, significantly more than any other city.  Kochi also has by far the lowest percentage of informal households (slums and informal settlements) at 1.4%.

In relative terms, STs/SCs are more likely to live in shacks and slums than OBCs/Forward castes as is the case in other cities, but the likelihood of SC/ST living in informal housing compared to other castes is the lower of any city.  Differences between the type of housing in which different religious communities live is very slight, and significantly lower than any other city.  Overall, there is very little caste or religious based housing segregation in Kochi. 

The most notable feature of governance in Kochi is that its citizens are much more likely, compared to other cities in our study, to entrust elected representatives and, to a lesser degree, government officials in addressing service-related issues. Kochi citizens have very favorable opinions of their representatives and government officials. 

Basic attitudes about citizenship in Kochi on the one hand are quite conventional by Indian urban standards, with most citizens believing that their most important duty is to vote followed by respecting the law and far fewer think it is about community involvement or respecting the rights of others.  On the other hand, Kochi citizens are the most socially liberal in our sample in that they are the least likely to believe that the government should ban inter-caste and inter-religious marriage and the most politically liberal in terms of supporting basic rights of free speech.

In terms of electoral participation, citizens of Kochi are more likely to register to vote than in other cities and have a high propensity to vote.  When it comes to participation in non-electoral party politics, Kochi citizens are about average, but do have the highest level of reported party membership.  In terms of civic participation, Kochi is about average.  But more so in than in other city, Kochi citizens are more likely to belong to civic or professional associations (i.e. unions, RWAs, NGOs and cooperative societies) than to “identity-based” associations (religious, cultural, caste-based).  We found variation in participation across social categories (class, caste and religion) but no clear patterns. 

With respect to service delivery we report two major findings. First, as indicated by our overall index of services (BSDII), Kochi, along with Vadodara, has the highest overall score in our cities.  When we break this down we find that in terms of water and sanitation overall coverage and quality is excellent, probably the best in any of our cities.  Second, what really makes Kochi exceptional in our study is that services are distributed on a very inclusive basis with only minor differences across classes (housing types), castes and religions.

The inclusiveness of Kochi is also captured in our various measures of the mechanisms of social inequality.  We found that Kochi’s citizens do not report any significant discrimination and that they are much more likely to have friends outside of their own caste or religious group than in any other city.